From Dorothy Height, chairwoman, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and Margot Dorfman, CEO, U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce
In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “Time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively.”

So Dr. King might not have been surprised to learn that, almost 40 years after his death, the major battle about the nation’s civil rights laws is being fought over the issue of time.

At issue: Victims of discriminatory pay practices forfeit their rights to legal redress 180 days — only six months — after their employers first decide to pay them less than their coworkers because of their race, gender, age, or disability.

That is the result of the Supreme Court’s decision last year in Ledbetter v. Goodyear. Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. in Gadsden, Ala., successfully sued the company for paying her less than men doing the same work. A jury found that Goodyear violated her rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a law Dr. King called “a second Emancipation.”

But Goodyear appealed the decision, arguing that her complaint was too late. Remarkably, a sharply divided Supreme Court sided with Goodyear by a 5-4 margin. Title VII requires that employees file complaints within 180 days of “the alleged unlawful employment practice.” With a logic that defies the life experience of working Americans, the court ruled the 180-day deadline started to run from the time of the decision to pay Ms. Ledbetter less, rather than — as the law had previously been understood — the day of her last discriminatory paycheck.

This ruling defies past practice, common sense, and most Americans’ sense of right and wrong. Most workers don’t know how much their coworkers earn, and it often takes years for them to realize that they are victims of pay discrimination. But employers do know what they pay their employees, and this decision removes a powerful deterrent that would discourage companies from paying workers with the same responsibilities at different rates, just because of their race, gender, age or some other irrelevant attribute.

That is why Congress is considering legislation that would restore the law to where it was, and allow workers to challenge pay discrimination within 180 days of a discriminatory paycheck, and not just from when the discrimination begins.

As Lilly Ledbetter can attest, as long as an employer discriminates against you by paying you less, you should have 180 days from that discriminatory paycheck to contest and correct it. As Dr. King taught us decades ago: “It is always the right time to do what is right.”

Washington